


Money and Madness

by nirejseki



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Dragons, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-21
Updated: 2016-04-21
Packaged: 2018-06-03 13:19:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6612115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which dragons are an invasive parasitical species, but humans think they’re really cool anyway.</p>
<p>A/N: THIS IS ALL THE FAULT OF @joker-quinn and @youreturningscarletscarlet on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Dragons meant money or madness.

Len had no idea who coined the aphorism, but it was universally acknowledged. No one knew what it was that drew the dragons out of their hiding spots, half a universe over sideways where the faeries had gone long ago, but once in a blue moon they would crawl out and find a worthy child. Teenager, sometimes; rarely older than that – they needed a soft human soul to curl around, to nest in, before they could emerge, full-formed, as adults. 

Giant, glittering beasts possessed with a love of beautiful things that dwarfed cars in their shadow and could take to the sky with enormous wings, yet could also fold away into apparent nothingness so as not to disturb their holders when they went indoors – they had been the calling card of the rich and famous for centuries without end. A dragon at your side the surest way to fame and fortune and reality television.

Dragons were the calling card of the infamous, too. No one knew what the balance was, whether a chosen child would be able to handle it and prosper or if they would become increasingly unstable, overcome by unassuageable gold-lust or the viciousness of tooth and claw. Dragons hide inside your bones, the saying goes, and sometimes they eat you from the inside until there’s nothing human left. 

Didn’t stop kids from dreaming of having one of their very own. 

Everyone knows you have only one shot at a dragon. If a dragon comes to you and asks, you have to say yes, or you’ll never see them again. The same with releasing them – you can let your dragon go, but once you do, they’re gone for good. That’s the reason even the people whose dragons have gone bad within them refuse to give them up. No one wants to have touched the world of fantasy, only to come back and be tied down to earth. 

When Mick had still young enough to have gone by Mikey, he had swallowed a fire-drake. He’d promptly been swept away by an array of media hounds, agents, producers, directors; everyone wanted to get a cut of a boy whose eyes glowed gold and who spat fire like a bad habit. Mick doesn’t talk about those days, but Len thinks it’s even odds if the first arson Mick had started – the fancy trailer he’d been forced to live in instead of a home – had been dragon-inspired or not. Either way, as soon as his pyromania became evident, the media faded away like mist in the face of a hurricane. No one wanted to be associated with a _mad_ dragonholder, one of the eaten, after all. That wasn’t the fantasy they could package up and sell; it wasn’t good television. 

Someone had tried once to make a show about the lives of the eaten. Len thinks he heard somewhere that the producer in question had ended the show by being eaten himself – literally. 

Mick’s family, disappointed that their cash cow was gone so quickly and a little afraid, hadn’t had much use for him after that, either.

Len’s story is different. He was eight, walking outside on the hottest day of a blistering August, his bare feet scorching against the asphalt and sweat dripping down his sides, his throat parched and his head starting to pound. It was better than being at home, even if there was air conditioning there. 

He’d heard a noise, something between a kitten’s cry and the creak of a rusty motor; had ducked down and seen something small and fragile and almost translucent. It was wandering around, heat-drunk, coughing up bits of steam instead of what Len would later learn was her natural element of ice. Len hadn’t answered any questions or proven himself worthy or any of the crap you hear on television; he’d just gone to his knees, gathered the creature up, opened up that hollow part in his chest that had never been filled and let the dragon crawl right in. His eyes had rolled back into his head with bliss as his internal body temperature immediately dropped a full degree.

Len burned his knees bad enough to scar, kneeling there in the sun, but he’d never regretted a single moment of it.

Maybe it was his natural reticence, hard-learned lessons about not telling adults the truth about anything you don’t want taken away from you, but he never told anyone about her. So there was no media circus for him, no fame and riches sweeping in from far away to take him away from a terrible childhood. He figured that had to make him one of the eaten, but he never quite seemed to go mad, either. At least not the way he understood madness.

Len just went along with his life, his dragon nesting in the cold right by his heart.

He named her Liesel, after a movie he’d seen twenty minutes of once. The sound of rain and a delighted cry. 

When Lisa was born, he thought of them as his two Lises, his Lisa and his Liesel, and whispered his secret to his sister until his father taught him a lesson in not telling his sister lies. 

When they met at juvie for the first time, Mick avoided touching everyone. Even when he saved Len’s ass from being skewered, he’d just stomped forward and glared them all away. Len, little punk that he was, had never seen a stop sign that he wouldn’t run through, so after being rebuffed even the most innocent of touches for days – Mick insisted he put food down instead of handing it to him, walked a minimum of two feet away at all times, never offered a hand up when Len had fallen – he’d gotten tired of it and tackled him one night, wielding a pillow with lethal aim.

He didn’t understand Mick’s expression of terror back then, had only been pleased when it faded into confusion and then pleasure as he perched on Mick’s stomach, swatting at him with the limp pillow and vowing to find _somewhere_ that the older boy was ticklish. It wasn’t until years later that Mick confessed that everyone he touched at that age burned, his dragon wild and uncontrolled in Mick’s skull, a growth spurt that could not be denied. Len, kept cold by Liesel, hadn’t even noticed.

There’d never been any question as to their career after juvie, of course; just because they were eaten, not famous, didn’t mean that they didn’t have their dragons to take care of. And everyone knew that dragons loved beautiful things. The modern day hoard: art on the walls, fine food on the table, beautiful people all around. See, if you’re not famous, these things cost money. 

So money they go to get. There’s nothing either of them wouldn’t do to make their dragons happy.

Liesel was his best girl, his one and only chance, but Len only got to see her step out of his chest, full-grown and heart-breakingly beautiful, porcelain wings tipped with ice crystals and breath colder than frost, a handful of times before he did the unthinkable and let her go. 

He’d been in his mid-twenties, could call Liesel out at will but almost never did, a lifetime of restraint keeping her at his side when he could. He excelled at his chosen profession and he didn’t need a dragon to do it, though he and Mick sometimes took the train out to the middle of nowhere and raced in the sky for hours, Mick’s dark burnished red and gold against Len’s white and silvery blue. 

And then there was the fire. The big one. 

Mick could set fires, and he did so gloriously, but his fire-drake provided no protection against the fire once lit. Mick’s arms were scared with burns from a young age, scorching up and down his shoulders and along his back; his voice was raspy with smoke. 

When the inferno he had started on one side of the building had rushed past them to cut them off, carried forth by some unknown accelerant that someone else had planted, Len had passed through the flames without a blink, but Mick was trapped there amongst his element. The room was too small to summon a dragon into, and anyway Len couldn’t risk bringing Liesel out into something so opposed to her element, while Mick’s dragon would have only made everything burn hotter, killed him quicker. Len had run towards the fire extinguisher, a doorway, a table, anything he could use to bridge the flames to get Mick out. Their partner at the time, a measly-mouthed spineless little man that Len couldn’t even recall the name of any more, had shot him in the stomach, point-blank, when Len had tried to enlist his help in rescuing Mick instead of assisting him in getting out. Len had fallen to the ground, unable to rise again, unable to call for help; he’d barely managed to pull himself under a table to protect himself from the falling debris, trailing a smear of blood along the ground, and then he’d seen Mick. Standing there, alone, resigned to his fate, an expression of ecstatic glory on his face. 

Len touched his stomach, its bleeding wound, and thought, _no._

_Only one of us dies today_.

He’d barked his orders to Liesel, who had understood, who always understood, flowing out of his soul. Len could feel their bond stretching far beyond what it was when he let her out to assume her true form, the bond pulling and pulling like stretch water taffy, until between one heaving breath and the next it was gone and his soul was empty, a gaping vacuum inside him which had once been large enough to house a dragon. 

The agony was indescribable. 

Passing out was no mercy, because even as he faded he knew that if he ever woke up, it would be to live like this, a half-man, a soulless man, forever and always.

Instead he woke up warm, warm like he hadn’t been since before he’d met Liesel, warm like the blanket his mother used to wrap around his shoulders in the dead of winter. A cup of hot chocolate with mini marshmallows. 

Len opened his eyes. Mick was sitting next to his bed. He didn’t even have any new scars: they were all old and tough like leather, no shininess that spoke of recent flames. 

“You survived,” he croaked. 

Mick nodded. “Nothing burns through your coat of ice, Lenny,” he said. “You know that. That’s why you sent her to me, isn’t it?”

Len nods, putting his hand to his chest. He should feel empty, but he doesn’t. He feels warm.

Something uncurls across his chest.

“I named her Sarah,” Mick says quietly, almost shyly. He’s never shared that before, not even when Len finally got up the courage to introduce him to Liesel. Len strips away his shirt, staring down at the dark red lines that mar his skin like a tattoo he never got, lines of gold so faint as to resemble silvery scars, moving under his skin as his dragon’s chest rises and falls as it breathes. Mick’s fire-drake – _Sarah_ – curls around him, under his skin, keeping him warm. 

“They can’t go all the way inside anymore,” Mick tells him, lifting his own shirt to show Liesel’s familiar face curled around Mick’s hip. She seems to have gone for Mick’s leg instead of his torso, curled around him like a loving cat. “I think we’re the wrong size, inside. But they can sit under our skin. They can still come out. They aren’t gone.”

Len smiles, and breathes flame. 

—————————

One day while training in the Waverider’s cargo hold, Sara jokingly grabs Len’s ice gun to fire off a few shots, only to drop it after the first, wincing and shaking her hand out. “Crap, that thing is _cold_ ,” she says admiringly. “Your gloves must be real good to withstand _that_. Where’d you get them?”

“If I told you,” Len drawls in his best solemn tone, letting his lips twitch the slightest amount to show her that he was joking. “I’d have to kill you. Professional thief secret, you know how it is.”

Len and Mick both liked Sara, had instantly gravitated towards her as soon as they’d heard her name, but Len wasn’t about to tell her that he’d actually bought them at a street fair in Central, three sets for twelve bucks, because Sarah took even the suggestion of frostbite as a personal offense.

He’d learned _that_ the first time he’d nearly iced his own leg off testing out mods for his cold gun. Liesel had lolled over laughing at him – it wasn’t _any less offensive_ when she did it as a printed image on his (also laughing) partner’s side than it was when she did it fully manifested, Len wanted to be clear on that. Although he had to admit not having a dragon larger than a pick-up truck literally roll over with laughter inside their cramped apartment was space-conscious. Sarah, in contrast, had hissed like a cat unexpectedly dropped into a bath. She’d burnt the black right off his skin, healing the damage so quickly it was like standing in a burst of desert wind.

Sarah’s nothing like his quiet, reserved Liesel; she’s a narcissistic drama queen with a quick-fire temper and a nasty bite. You can tell that she grew up in Mick’s soul. Naturally, Len adores her unreservedly. 

Sure, he can’t really go swimming anymore; people kept thinking he was some badly undercover member of the Yakuza, with a red-and-gold dragon wrapped all around his chest and arms, and no amount of “I’m not even _Japanese_ ” had helped with that. The criminal underworld was so untrusting. But it’s fine; he never really liked taking off his shirt anyway, had too many scars for that, and the glimpses people sometimes got from under his sleeves had gotten him respect enough in prison, where ink was practically a religious requirement. 

(Sarah had eaten all the tattoos he’d had before and – just out of spite – his memory of what they were, too, though she’d very snidely left him the visceral sense memory of having gotten them at one point. Apparently the only ink he was allowed to have now was her, his darling selfish little minx.)

Liesel is – to literally _nobody’s_ surprise – significantly better behaved. After a lifetime hidden away tight in Len’s soul, she’s shy, curling around Mick’s leg and only occasionally peeping her head up to his hip to look around, ducking her head back down every time Mick went shirtless around other people. Which, in fairness, Mick did a lot more than Len ever had. 

(Her shyness did not preclude possessiveness – Mick’s skin had always had too many scars and burns to take ink well, or Len suspects that she would have followed her sister’s example. She’s also much more likely to bite unsuspecting people under the table if she feels they’ve insulted Mick somehow.)

Mick marvels at her on a regular basis, running his fingers along the lines on his leg nearly as often as he reaches for his lighter. He compliments her until Len’s blushing by proxy, somehow knowing instinctively that constant appreciation is the way to her vain little heart – and now that she’s learned what it’s like to be buffeted up and worshipped, she demands a strict tribute: if Mick forgets to be nice to her, she douses his flames with a cough of icy breath. 

By mutual unspoken agreement, Len and Mick don’t tell anyone else on the Waverider about their dragons, refusing to let them out to stretch their wings and whispering comfort to them late at night, urging caution and stillness whenever they feel someone watching. They’re not ashamed of Liesel and Sarah – far from it – but part of the reason they work their own crew is because no one really _wants_ to work with the eaten. Even Lisa is a little wary, though she defiantly ignores her better instincts and works with them anyway, any time they call; anyone less devoted would have abandoned them to each other years ago. 

The others on board are far too well-adjusted to have dragons – for all of her assassin skills, Sara had a disgustingly ordinary childhood, and Len shudders to think about a dragon getting caught up in Kendra and Carter’s endless merry-go-round of bullshit. Mick thinks that someone like Sarah would suit Firestorm well, but then they get stuck debating if the dragon would belong to Stein or Jax, and where the dragon would rest when they’re split up, so they regretfully put that thought aside. 

Raymond could have been a dragonholder, Mick says to Len one day, and Len agrees. Raymond has a hole in his heart that eats and eats and eats but can never be filled, no matter how many acts of heroism he does or how many women he falls in love with; even now, he speaks wistfully of dragons, having never let go of his childish dreams even when the others on board lightly tease him for it. 

Len sometimes wants to crack him open and look inside to find the dragon that must have crawled in one day when Ray wasn’t looking, who is sleeping still. 

Time Masters don’t have dragons. Rip claims it’s because they’re far too practical to be carting around giant monsters everywhere they go; Len suspects it’s because they don’t want them, not really. Time itself fills up all the empty spots in their hearts, leaving no room for dragons. Liesel and Sarah seem unaffected by the travel in time, though, entirely unmoved if slightly peeved at the lack of room to curl up around their humans, or else Len and Mick would’ve quit right away.

——————————

When he and Sara get stuck in the cargo hold with their oxygen and warmth seeping slowly out into the vacuum of space, Len gives her his jacket and tucks her head under his chin, letting his higher-than-average body temperature warm her core even as he breathes out pure oxygen into the space above her head, the unlit fuel of dragonfire, and tells her stories to distract her. Sara’s too caught up with the fight that follows to do the math: they should have suffocated six minutes before they were rescued. 

Mick gets shot with a laser three times on the pirate ship, shrugs it off to their amazement. A laser’s just a finer form of fire, he tells them with a savage, angry grin, thinking of sitting inside a burning building in 2046 as people danced amongst the flames, of where they could have been kings, where no one would have turn them away for what they had in their skin. The time pirates don’t understand what he means. 

With Sarah’s urging, Len is possessed by the mission, by the chance to do something great and good and bold; at Liesel’s, Mick wants to go home to the things he knows best and won’t stop at anything to get there. Not for the first time, they are at an impasse; they settle it as best they can, with tooth and claw and gun, out of the sight of the others. 

Len gets the upper hand and leaves Mick in a pocket that Gideon has assured him is safe. 

He tells Liesel to take care of Mick until he can return to them; leaves his partner under the wing of his best girl and his best girl under the skin of his partner. He trusts nobody more with that which is most precious to him. 

Sarah roars under his skin when they see what lurks beneath Kronos’ mask, a fire burning so hot inside his belly that he knows anyone who tried to touch him now would light up in flames. Mick’s eyes are empty. 

Eaten. 

Even Rip is taken aback by the change in Mick; the lack of any human response, any empathy. Kronos was notoriously relentless: no one stood in his path, not women nor children, neither guilty or innocent. Mick scarcely recognizes them in the depths of his fury; he whispers threats to each of them – Sara’s father drowning in a poisoned drink or shot by accident in some back-alley brawl after hearing stories of her demise, Jax’s mother lit in effigy of her lost son, Stein’s beloved wife ripped out of the timeline one piece at a time. He has no restraints, no morality, no limits. Rip confesses that he doesn’t know what dread device the Time Masters have developed in his absence that could cause such crisis of the soul and mind.

The others could have told him what it was, if they’d known about the dragons. This was it, the end of the line for all the eaten, when the dragon’s eaten the human soul entire and then turned upon itself, leaving nothing behind but dragonfire and ashes. As it is, they keep their distance from Mick, promises to try to reform him aside. Sara lasts the longest, visiting once or twice only to be driven away by Mick’s ice cold eyes. 

Len can’t see Liesel anywhere, and Mick doesn’t speak to him. Mick wants to _possess_ him, wants to take him back to his hoard like a trophy, wants to hurt him and wants to kill for him; Len can see it in his eyes. Draconic instinct in human form. 

Money or madness; sometimes he thinks that even the lucky ones just learn how to hide it better.

Len turns off all the cameras in the brig before he goes in to talk with his partner; he tells Gideon that it’s personal, between the two of them, and ices over all of her access points just to make sure. Ices over the door, too; it’ll burn anyone who tries to get in. He doesn’t want to have any interruptions.

Mick might have had indefinite years of training at the hands of the Time Masters, but the Time Masters knew nothing of dragons. They probably thought it was whatever they did to Mick that swallowed his soul, their brainwashing techniques so successful they sent Kronos first to each dire task. Len knows better. 

Sarah roars and Len bares his teeth. Mick’s eyes flash and he extends his hands like claws. Len wants his partner back. Mick wants Len to join him, to leave behind his human concerns and come by his side for an eternity of gold and blood. They are at an impasse. 

They fight, tooth and claw, just like they did in the forest where Len left Mick, thinking he was safe. There is no finesse, no tricks; there never is when they fight each other. It’s as if they’re children again, letting their dragons consume them for the first time; it’s as if they’re animals. 

Mick wins and Len exposes his throat in submission. Sarah roars again and again as Mick perches above Len’s fallen body, eyes still flashing and hand pulled back, ready to gut him open, to pull out the dragon inside. 

But before he does it, in the breath of air before the strike, there’s another roar in return, starting quiet but growing louder, piercing and shrieking like the wind in a thunderstorm. Len knows that sound like he knows his own heartbeat. 

_Liesel._

She rises up behind Mick, wrenching free from his skin and filling the room around them, and she _vomits_ up all of Mick’s memories and feelings and thoughts, all the parts of him that make him human, everything she’s been keeping safe in her belly where the Time Masters could never reach. Mick falls back, eyes wide. 

“Oh, hello, there, beautiful,” he whispers, lifting up a hand to her long, sinuous neck. “I don’t even remember being gone, but I remember missing you.”

Sarah wants to come out to play, but Len keeps her in with a solid effort. One dragon’s already bursting the cell in the brig to its utmost (Liesel’s draped her tail over him and has a leg halfway up the wall; it’s an ungainly position, not worthy of her grace, but she’s too busy cooing over Mick to care); two would probably burst the hull open and then where would they be?

“As fun as this is,” Len drawls. “Maybe we should wrap it up before someone comes in? _Literally_ wrap it up, in your case?”

He’s running his hands down Liesel’s tail as he speaks, preening each scale and digging in with his fingernails just the way she likes, so maybe Mick’s justified when he laughs at him. Len’s okay with his hypocrisy; he doesn’t want her to go away again so soon either, but that doesn’t mean he’s not right.

Mick opens his collar and Liesel sinks back into his skin with a happy purr. Sarah quiets down as well, nuzzling Len’s collarbone and wrapping her tail around his left arm, squeezing a little to remind him that she’s there. 

Len’s bruised and beaten and sore, as is his right as the loser; Mick, as the winner, is restored to full health. 

“They’re gonna think you let me win,” Mick says at last. “You may get a talk about suicidal impulses. Probably from Grey.”

Len, who fought his _ass_ off in this battle, thank you very much, huffs in annoyance. “They should’ve seen you in the forest,” he mutters. “I kicked your _ass_.”

Mick hums pleasantly at the reminder. Dragons are violent creatures – they wrestle and they bite and they sometimes maim in their quest to show affection; both Len and Mick have their fair share of scars courtesy of Liesel and Sarah and each other. Neither of them mind. 

“When this mission’s done…” Mick starts. He lost in the forest, they keep on with the mission; those are the rules.

“We go home,” Len promises. “We’ll pick a house that we can defend properly, not just a safe house, and we’ll build up a proper hoard, just you and me, and we’ll rip apart anyone who comes too close.” He lost in the cell, Mick gets what he wants; those are the rules.

Mick nods. “Lisa can visit,” he says magnanimously. “Sometimes. You know I can drive a time ship now?”

“Mona Lisa, here we come?” Len joked. They’d gotten into their very first fistfight over the Mona Lisa, back when they were both scrappy little runts – Mick had said it was what _he_ would steal if he had a time machine and Len had said something dumb about declining value of an unknown property if they stole it too early and the difficulty in fencing it if they stole it too late, and somehow they’d ended up in solitary with a black eye each, both laughing their heads off as the juvie officials had tried to understand how two useless delinquent punks had managed to get into a fight about _art history_ of all things. Len was _never_ letting that one go.

Mick glared at him, not meaning it. “Just for that, I’m dumping you on the Titanic.”

“Sarah’ll keep me warm,” Len said, already imagining it – if they could get an oxygen mask in there (they could pinch Ray’s), he could swim through the cold waters and grab the jewels all left behind by the rich and powerful of the 1910s, and any losses not found when the wreck was recovered would be ascribed to oceanic drift. It wasn’t a bad idea, actually.

“I know that look,” Mick rumbled. “Save it for later.”

Len smirked at him, sitting up slowly. He was incredibly sore and stiff already. “Don’t forget; I lose, you feed me.”

“I won’t forget, you big baby,” Mick said, rolling his eyes. “Next town we go to, I’ll rip the still-beating heart of something nice and juicy and serve it to you raw.” He paused and added pointedly, “Which is _much_ more impressive than the _candy bar_ you left me.”

“Don’t start,” Len sniffed. “Reese’s cups are your favorite. And you _like_ hunting things down for me.” Mick shrugged in acknowledgement. Sure, sometimes Len preferred him to fetch pizza, but if he had the _option_ , Mick far preferred the old fashioned way of making up. Len said it was a residue from his farm days and teased him; Mick had retaliated by shanghaiing Liesel into dropping a live cow in the middle of their safe house and laughing as Len freaked out. Which Len is not ashamed of, because those things are a _lot bigger_ than what you might think if you just saw them on TV, like he had. 

Electricity crackled by the door – Len’s ice was melting and someone was trying to get in. They exchanged wry glances and pick themselves up. 

“I got some useful intel I can share with them,” Mick says as Len walks out of the cell. “That should buy me bail. There’s Hunters coming after us.”

“ _Hunters_?” Len asked, all the scorn of a thousand years of draconic arrogance in his voice. “They overcompensating for something?”

Mick snorted. “Yeah, actually,” he replied casually. “They’re my back-ups, going in where they hit something I won’t touch – not that there was much by the end of it, I think – but they haven’t had to do much in a while. Shouldn’t be a problem. But after that, they’ll send the Pilgrim to try to eradicate us from the timeline.”

“Don’t tell them that all at once,” Len advised. “We want to keep you out of the cage. Start with the Hunters.” He glances at the door. He’s got another minute before Gideon breaks through. “Can this Pilgrim do that?”

“Not to us,” Mick says immediately. “Dragons aren’t from this Earth and they aren’t subject to its Time; when we become dragonholders we take a step sideways back towards their place, so we’re inviolate. Time Masters have no idea why there are some people they can’t kill; they think it’s something to do with their relevance to history or something. Call it the Jack the Ripper paradigm.”

“Of course they’ve tried to murder Jack the Ripper,” Len sighs. “They try to save Van Gogh’s ear, too?”

“Hey, the Mona Lisa joke’s bad enough, you even _start_ with the Van Gogh shit too, and I’m going to –”

The expressions on Rip, Sara and Ray’s faces when they come in to hear Len and Mick arguing – loudly – about their favorite post-impressionists (Mick liked them, Len thought they were overrated and best depicted on _Doctor Who_ ) and Mick’s disdain for romantic landscapes (Len will literally fight _anyone_ who insults JM Turner, no shame) are absolutely priceless; they look _just_ like those guards in juvie way back when.

Maybe one day they’ll explain.

But probably not.

———————————

Their hoard in Central City is _magnificent_. 

Mick gets the bright idea of following the Flash around until they locate something suitably ominous and super-villainy. Len scoffs, but weirdly enough, it works. There’s a creepy old former orphanage lurking by the middle-class part of town; it’s neither rich enough for them to visit on work or poor enough for them to hang out in, but it’s actually not all that far from Saints & Sinners. (That had been Len’s vote, but Mick had made some serious arguments regarding size and excitable dragons who had been cooped up for ages, and Len had taken his point.) The architecture had appealed to both of them and that’s it, apparently they’ve found their new lair.

Besides, their other choice – the weird old tower off in the north side of the city – still stunk of gorilla. 

Len actually paid for the property, wanting to make sure they owned the land, free and clear – well, as free and clear as you could when you paid for it using swiped diamonds from 2147, which was pretty damn free and clear (the technology to scan them for theft wasn’t going to be invented for another century at least). Then they’d spend months meticulously tearing down walls and building new ones where needed. Being a thief with a serious case of gold-lust for going on thirty years made for a _great_ nest egg. 

They’d even kidnapped Cisco to help build them some sort of technological moat substitute because if you had turrets, you clearly needed a moat. After he’d recovered from the shock of having his taxi get hijacked, Cisco’d been really enthusiastic about the project and the Flash had been super embarrassed to come across them arguing about voltage capacity instead of the “bad thieves, cowering Cisco” routine he’d expected to find. 

Mick wanted the moat to be made of fire. Len bargained him down to a fire pit the size of a swimming pool. 

Lisa was allowed to visit, of course; they reserved a room especially for her. Len filled it with creepy porcelain dolls for her first visit. Unsurprisingly, she ran out of there like she was being chased by the hounds of hell and punched him repeatedly on the arm for next hour straight. 

Other people came by sometimes. Sara, of course, who had been absolutely delighted to find out that all those times she’d overheard Len muttering “Goddamnit, Sarah” he hadn’t been talking about her, and even more delighted because she found out about it by virtue of Len breathing fire into the face of the goon that had managed to pin her in that last battle against Savage. (His gun had been knocked out of his hands, what was he supposed to do?) 

She’d bugged them about seeing their dragons in full form for ages – “I always thought you just had some great ink, but now I want to see the full-size version, not the preview!” – right up until she’d come by when Sarah and Liesel were wrestling. 

After that, she was much more respectful.

Why yes, Sara, they _are_ very large. 

(Mick had immediately followed that up with the cow story – turned out Sara was a city girl as much as Len was a city boy, so that had necessitated taking her out flying to find a cow. Their quest for live hamburger was successful on all counts, and Sara had to admit she’d never had better barbeque even if she was a bit strangely squeamish as to the acquisition of the meat.)

Firestorm had visited, though Stein had seemed wary right up until he’d discovered that Mick had his old time ship from his time as Kronos parked in the attic, at which point he’d become exceedingly friendly again. Jax had just walked in one day and made himself at home with their excessively large television but in his defense, it _was_ Super Bowl Sunday and they _had_ offered. 

Ray kept asking to come visit, very respectfully, but they kept saying no for his own good right up until the day Len finally snapped and just kidnapped Ray from where he’d been doing the hero thing with Kendra. 

“You could have just told me to show up…?” Ray said. “Not that I mind! I’m actually really excited to see your dragons.”

“Oh, you’re going to see them all right,” Len muttered, vaguely feverish, his eyes glinting gold. 

Mick came out of the house and rescued Ray before Len did anything too violent, coaxing him away with from his rightful prey with false promises and then icing him into his room with his own cold gun until he cooled down. 

When he had come out of his room, Ray had been sitting there in the living room on one of their five sofas, looking a little hurt.

“Did I do something to make you mad?” he asked.

Len sighed. “I think you have a dragon inside of you and I want to bring it out,” he said shortly. Mick glares at him from across the room, but he just fought his way out of his own damn room, he’s in no mood for things like tact. 

Ray gaped at him. “ _Really_? I mean - do you really think that’s possible?”

“Haircut. It’s a bad idea. I mean, no offense, but…seriously. Look at us.” Mick gestured at their lair, which had priceless art on every available surface that wasn’t otherwise being used for tech supplies or the literal piles of money from that bank job they’d pulled in Bludhaven last week. Len didn’t exactly see what the problem was, but Mick was still being weird about fact that Len’d been using the Rodin in the corner as a coat rack for the last few months, so who knew? 

“But –”

“The process might kill you,” Mick warns.

Ray nodded. “I understand. I’ll consider the risks very carefully before I do anything rash, I promise. Uh, what’s the process consist of, exactly?”

“I have absolutely _no idea_ ,” Mick said, very sincerely, and they both turned to look at Len.

“I’m not entirely sure either,” Len admitted, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “But I _know_ I can do it.”

It took all of two months before Raymond came back. Len had boasting rights; Mick had thought it would take him three. 

Raymond’s dragon is as glorious as Len always knew it would be, all sleek and black and _lazy_ , and next thing they know Raymond’s moved in with them because apparently Anna thinks their lair is _swell_ – direct quote from Raymond there – and they have to get him a room in the northwest tower. He commutes to work by dragon-wing, and Kendra by hawk-wing, and they’re both disgustingly happy. 

They pick up some more strays, too, though they don’t all live in the lair. Mardon, Rathaway, even James – somehow they’ve become the central go-to point for all the eaten in Central and Keystone. Liesel and Sarah have the advantage of home ground and kick the other dragons’ asses up and down the square (much to the dismay of the local fire department, police force, and army base), but in the end they hammer out some hierarchy rules and it all works out pretty well.

Sometimes Len and Mick still hop a train out into the middle of nowhere and race in the sky for hours, Len’s dark burnished red and gold against Mick’s white and silvery blue. Sometimes they switch back, for old times’ sake.

Either way, they’re happy.

Money or madness – Len figures, between him and Mick, they’re doing pretty well.


	2. Lisa

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At joker-quinn's request, here's Lisa in the dragonholder au, being badass as always.

Lisa knows all about dragons growing up. It’s hard to avoid them – they’re in bedtime stories and on television and in the movies. The rich and famous, the dragonholders. The people with a dragon in their soul. Every kid dreams of it, even knowing that their chances were slim to the point of vanishing. They whisper about it excitedly in her school when the teacher isn’t looking, they play dragon and dragonholder at recess, they draw pictures of what “their” dragon would look like for art class. They tell scary stories about dragonholders gone wrong, the _eaten_ , around the fire at camp, munching on burnt marshmallows as the speaker tries out their very best dragon-growl.

Lisa’s got a secret: her big brother’s got a dragon. He’s one of the chosen ones, the ones destined for fame and fortune; sure, it hasn’t happened yet, but she’s sure of it. Lenny _told_ her he had a dragon, so it must be true.

Her friends in elementary school believed her at first, but came back the next day shaking their heads and telling her that _their_ parents said it was impossible. 

She only makes the mistake of telling her teacher once. It was her very favorite teacher, Mrs. Silvia, and she had _told_ her it was a big secret, but Mrs. Silvia had told Daddy about it anyway. Daddy had come home very mad and he’d yelled at her for telling lies. She cries out that it wasn’t a lie, burst into tears. It can’t be a lie. _Lenny said so_. 

Daddy starts yelling at Lenny, then, and Lenny tells her to go into the other room. She hides under her covers and tries to ignore the noise from the other room, the sounds of smacking flesh and cracking leather. Lenny comes to her a few hours later, moving slow and sore and swollen, a cut right under his eye where Daddy’s belt buckle must’ve scratch him. He brings her a bowl of mac and cheese, her favorite, that she knows he’s made for her, because it’s past her dinnertime and Daddy’s gone out to the bar again.

“You really got a dragon, don’t you?” she whispers, needing reassurance. Needing to know her world was still right side up. “It ain’t a lie, is it?”

He smiles at her, kisses her lightly on the side of the head. “It’s not a lie,” he says solemnly. “I promise.”

“Then why don’t you let your dragon out to fight him?” she asks, thinking of all the giant creatures you see on television, glittering in the sunlight as they swoop above the red carpet, the dragonholders all posing in dresses designed to highlight their dragon’s colors. Dragons were huge. They could _step_ on Daddy next time he tries to hurt Lenny. 

“My dragon’s not big enough, Lise,” he tells her. “She needs to grow up, big and safe.” He touches his chest, the part where he said his dragon curled up. “She’s sleeping now. Besides, if she stepped on Dad, who’d take care of you?”

“You would, silly,” she giggles, curling up into his lap. He hisses a little, but lets her clamber onto him and cling to him for comfort. “I wanna see your dragon,” she tells him. “No one believes me ‘bout you.”

“Just you wait, golden girl,” he says. “Just wait till she’s all grown up. Then you’ll see.”

\---------------------

At ten, she blows up at Lenny, tells him he’s a filthy liar and he’s always been a liar. She’s trying to hurt him, needs to lash out at _somebody_ , because she’s been angry ever since he went away to juvie for a while when she was seven and Daddy hit her for the first time because Lenny wasn’t there to protect her. Because he found someone there, someone he liked, someone he talks about sometimes – someone he’s making plans to meet again, now that he’s eighteen, _legal_ , now that he can go where he pleases and there’s nothing Daddy can do to keep him home. 

He’s been sitting there, taking her yelling without a word, without trying to defend himself, because he knows he’s in the wrong, but that one makes him blink a little. “A liar?” he asks, looking a little hurt. “When’ve I ever lied to you, golden girl?”

“You lie to me all the time!” she cries out, hating the tears that filled her eyes. “You keep telling me you’ve got a dragon, that we were _special_ , but that’s just a _lie_. It’s always been a lie.”

“It ain’t a lie, Lise. What makes you think that it is?” he asks.

“We’re not _rich_ , Lenny,” she says angrily. “We’re not famous. Nobody cares about us. It’s been years and years and you keep telling me that one day I’ll get to meet your dragon, but _it’s not true_. You’ll just keep telling me stories about why I can’t see her and you _laugh_ at me because I’m not old enough to know better than to believe you, just like with Santa and the tooth fairy and all that other stuff. You _can’t_ have a dragon. Dragons need beautiful things, right? That’s why everybody loves them so much; that’s why they’re always on television. And this –” she gestured to their crappy house, with its terrible patched-over furniture that Lenny rescued from street corners, with its dark, cold basement with a lock on the door, with the clothing tossed everywhere and the piles of garbage and dust, the collection of beer bottles that scatter over every surface no matter how often she and Lenny clean up. “–this isn’t beautiful, Lenny! No dragon would want to live _here_.”

He’s silent for a long moment as she sobs out her anger. They were all right – her friends at school, her teachers, even Daddy – and she was wrong. It’s time to put aside childish imaginings, thinking her brother was her knight in shining armor with a dragon by his side. Everyone knows a dragon means money, and they’ve never had any of that. She should have known better. 

“You’re here,” he says finally.

“What’s that?” she asks, not understanding.

“ _You’re_ here. You’re my treasure, golden girl; you’re beautiful enough to make up for all the rest.”

Her eyes fill with tears again. She knows he means it, knows he means every word, but it doesn’t appease her. “But you don’t got no dragon, Lenny. You _can’t_.”

He takes her by the hand and leads her outside, takes her all the way to the park even though it’s late and it can be dangerous there; all the people lurking around there that Lenny’s always told her never to talk to and _never_ to eat or drink anything they give her, just like the songs about Fairyland. 

“Why’re we here, Lenny?” she finally asks, looking around the deserted part of the park, by the children’s playground. 

“I may not have always protected you as well as I should have,” he says, his voice cracking a little with suppressed emotion. “But, Lisa, I have _never_ lied to you.”

A shadowy mist creeps around his shoulders and she shivers at the sudden chill. It’s spring, so the nights can still be a little cold, but this feels like a burst of winter come back again. It’s not until the shadow cuts out the light from the nearby streetlight that she realizes that it’s not a shadow, it’s not mist. It’s huge, a pale ghost of winter, coalescing from nearly invisible translucence into hard edges and tough scale. Porcelain white, like the fancy dolls she admired in shop windows as a girl, with a bluish underbelly and scattered grey scales over the wings shining like silver dollars. Wings. 

It’s a _dragon_.

It wraps its tail around Lenny’s leg, drapes a wing over his shoulder, curling up around him until its face – nearly half as big as she is – is nuzzling his hip on the other side. 

“Lisa, baby,” Len says. “My treasure, my golden girl. Meet Liesel.”

\----------------------

At twelve she has her first heartbreak. Some stupid boy she’d liked in the high school, who’d promised to take her out and then laughed about her with his friends, thinking that she’d be easy because her home was in the bad part of town. He hadn’t even had the respect to do it out of earshot from her. 

“I’m never going to find _anybody_ ,” she sobs into Lenny’s shoulder, the entire thing blowing out of proportion until it seemed to her teenage self like it was truly the end of the world. “There’s nobody out there that’s ever gonna want me.”

Lenny’s hands tighten around her shoulders until it’s a little painful. “That ain’t true, Lise,” he says. “You’re _mine_. You’re always gonna be mine.”

She looks up to tell him that’s not what she meant, but she’s stopped by the look on his face. He looks…savage. Almost murderous. Not the way their father looked when he was angry and drunk; nothing like that. There was something inhuman in that look, a fierce satisfaction and possessiveness that scared her even as it thrilled her, made her feel safe in his arms even as he held on to her too tightly.

“You can get any boy you like,” he promises her, looking her dead in the eyes. “You’ll get older and nothing and no one will stand in your way. You’ll collect so many boys that you’ll be able to pick one every night based on who matches your outfit. But in the end, you’ll always be _mine_. My treasure, _mi tesoro_ , my Lisa.” 

“You’re not going to hurt Ryan, are you?” she asked him. 

He grinned. “Oh, no, baby, no. I’m gonna teach _you_ how to do it.”

She kicks Ryan in the balls and breaks his nose the next day. At the parent-teacher conference which Lenny attends on her behalf, when the teachers debate suspending her, she widens her eyes and begins to sob, telling them all about how he asked her out on a date and then he tried – even though she was _clearly_ underage –

She still gets suspended, but Ryan’s mother dragged him out of there by his ear, looking fit to spit tacks. 

\----

When she’s in high school, Lenny – who’s no longer living at home, because he and Dad would probably kill each other if he did, but he comes by every few days to check on her – takes her out every few months to buy new clothes, so that the girls at school won’t make fun of her anymore. She doesn’t ask where the money’s from, but she’s betting it’s not from welfare or a job at some fast-food chain. 

Lenny also gives her jewelry. He held her hand when she got her ears pierced, then took her home and gave her three sets of earrings – hoops, dangling drops, and shining studs – so she’d have something to look forward to. That started a trend. He’s given her bracelets and necklaces, shows up at any old time with something new for her, and one year for her birthday he gives her a real life _tiara_ which she will never use in a million years but which she thinks is awesome. 

They’re all gold. 

“Only the _most_ glittery gold for my golden girl,” he’d told her, then pretended to look around. “Say, have you seen her anywhere?” She’d smacked him and pretended to be a princess for the rest of the day.

Her best friend in school, Theresa Gao, tests one of her bracelets in chemistry class, then hisses, “ _Holy crap_ , Lisa! This is real gold!” Lisa hides her jewelry better after that, makes sure Dad never knows what she’s got. She learns that she can sell some of the smaller pieces at the pawn shop if she needs quick cash and can’t get ahold of Lenny; at first she resisted, because it was a present, but Lenny tells her that the gold is there to adorn _her_ , not visa versa, so she should use it for whatever she wants.

Lenny’s the best big brother ever, even if he _does_ have a few open warrants here and there. 

Lisa goes to college for engineering, balancing a scholarship with a few choice jewelry sales and the way her bank account magically increases whenever Lenny’s pulled a job. Theresa goes in for psych, and asks her one day, eying the bruises on her forearms, if she’s not worried about Lenny falling into the whole “cycle of violence” thing you hear so much about.

“Lenny’s not like that,” Lisa objects. “He doesn’t get angry and hit me, not like Dad used to.”

“Those _are_ bruises he left, though, aren’t they?” Theresa replies shrewdly.

“It’s not the same,” Lisa says firmly. “Lenny’s doing it out of affection – no, not like _that_ , where I think he only hits me because he loves me. That’s bullshit. Lenny’s just like that; it’s how he shows he likes someone – punching them on the shoulder, wrestling with them, that sort of thing. He even lets me win most of the time. You have to understand, he really doesn’t like to touch people most of the time, so it’s actually a good sign. You should see him with _Mick_.”

Theresa’s heard about Mick, though she hasn’t met him – the warrants out for Mick’s hide are noticeably longer and more well-known than the ones out for Len, and she’s not letting Lenny bring his arsonist boyfriend anywhere near her college.

Maybe for graduation. It’d be a hell of a way to go out…

\-----------------

Len had a pair of figure skates circled by her favorite mathematical equation and her birthday tattooed on his right shoulder. It’s her favorite of his tattoos, one of the few he got professionally done rather than inked up during one of his stints in prison, and the one she misses the most when it’s gone.

She excuses herself to throw up in the bathroom when he comes to tell her that he let Liesel go to Mick, shows off his new dragon – _Sarah_ , he calls her, the one who used to be Mick’s – which is a spiraling, _living_ design covering the whole of his torso and back and draped over into his arms, and it’s not just because he nearly got himself killed. Lenny’s really excited about it, too. He doesn’t remember what tattoos he had before, just looks down fondly at his chest and says that Sarah didn’t much like them. 

Lisa’s terrified. She knows what it must have meant for Lenny to give up Liesel, who had been by his side since before Lisa’d even been born; she’d known he loved Mick nearly as much as he loved her, that fierce possessive love that makes her feel safe and makes her boyfriends run away screaming, but she hadn’t realized it was _that_ serious. And now, with her tattoo literally written over by something of Mick’s…

She makes a joke about them being dragon-married, and Lenny blinked at her owlishly. “Dragons don’t have marriage,” he says, like it’s obvious. “They show affection in other ways.”

“How’s that?” she asked, trying to calm her racing heart, her roiling belly.

He thinks about it. “Sharing something that you could take back to your hoard,” he finally tells her. “Letting them see the things that mean the most to you. Baring your throat to them, letting them know all your weak spots and still live on after, because you know they’re always at your back just as you’re at theirs.” 

He reaches up, touches the twisted gold earring she’s wearing, and smiles. “Hey, you’re wearing the one I got you for your sixteenth birthday.”

Lisa smiles back, meaning it this time, her shoulders relaxing. Mick was clearly here to stay, and honestly after all these years she should have known that already, but she’d been Lenny’s _first_. He wasn’t going to leave her behind, tattoos or no tattoos; that's all she wanted to know. 

“Sounds like marriage to me,” she says. “We should get you registered, do it the human way.”

He frowned. “I’m pretty sure it’s still illegal for two guys, Lise.”

Lisa grinned at him. “Since when has something being _illegal_ stopped you, you _jerk_?”

Naturally, the wedding is planned as a sideline for a job Lenny’s pulling, one he actually lets her help out with since the ice skating thing fell through in the end and the market for engineers is shit right now. The wedding goes great, the honeymoon too (they got so much money! She feels like Scrooge McDuck!), and naturally everything goes to hell about a month later when the people they stole from sent some rent-a-cops after them. 

The availability of private security forces with swat gear is a black mark on this country’s good name, and she was going to write a letter to her senator saying exactly that as soon as she got Len to the local hospital that treated at large convicts in return for some additional payments, made in cash. 

There’s a pretty large group in there already – apparently, there’s an ongoing gang war that Lenny’s been characteristically ignoring. The nurse pulls off Len’s shirt to start stitching him up – Lisa’s really happy that Len’s unconscious already, because the nurse isn’t gentle – and one of the mob guys standing around pokes her in the shoulder. “Nice ink,” he said. “Where’d he get it?”

She doesn’t know him on sight, but she knows enough about the way the others are fanned out around him to realize that this isn’t a simple question. It’s a dangerous one, especially with Lenny out of it and unable to defend himself. Lenny’s made a lot of enemies among the mob nowadays. 

“Oh, I don’t remember exactly. It’s a _Yakuza_ thing,” she tells him, keeping her eyes wide and innocent.

The man takes an automatic step backwards. The Yakuza isn’t big in Central, but they have offshoots everywhere and are so notoriously mean that even most other mob families take pause. “He isn’t Japanese,” he says suspiciously. 

“Oh, yes, well, he saved the life of one of the Yakuza princesses, so they took him away for a few years, trained him up in the mystical arts, made him super deadly. Inducted him into their clan as a reward. He’s called the Red Dragon.” She points at the wound being stitched up by the nurse. “You know how he got that? _Fighting ninjas_.”

She’s not sure what’s more pathetic, her horrific mashup of all the comic books and movies she’d seen in the last three weeks, or the fact that they _actually buy it_. 

A few months later, Lenny complains that no one seems to believe him at the beach when he explains that he’s not a member of the Yakuza; he looks incredibly bemused and somewhat aggravated by it. Lisa suggests that he not go swimming too much, and hides her giggles.

\--------------------

Lisa knows about the eaten, of course. 

It’s a condition ascribed to all the great serial killers and mass-murdering generals, whether or not they ever actually manifested a dragon. The people who can’t _handle_ having a dragon, who aren’t _good enough_ , that’s what people say; those are the ones that go mad. They should be put down, locked up, kept guarded; everyone _knows_ how they’re going to end up.

The first time she’d met Mick, she’d burst into tears, scared out of her wits. Pyromania starting as a kid? He was _definitely_ one of the eaten. She had no idea how much soul he had left in him, and her stupid brother wanted to keep him around. 

She’s gotten over that, of course; Lenny never asked her for anything but he asked her to accept his new partner, so she did by force of will. But she’s always been a little warier around Mick, a little more distant. _Eaten_.

She’d never really thought about how those stories affected Len.

There’s a crew she joins up with in Keystone one time, a few years after she threw in the towel and declared herself a full-time criminal who does a little engineering on the side rather than the other way around. She’s an excellent pick-pocket, but she’s a better driver – she knew that truck license would come in handy one day – so she’s on front-seat duty. It means she gets to hear all the comments from the guys crowded in the back and they’ve got no idea she’s listening. 

“Lisa Snart, huh? You think she’s related to whatshisname, Leonard Snart?”

“His sister, yeah.”

“Christ. Imagine growing up with something like _that_ in your family.”

Turns out there’s rumors going around that Len’s one of the eaten, a psycho waiting to happen. That’s why very few of the crews around Keystone are willing to join up with him, even though they acknowledge his plans are always superb and the take is always more than they can get on their own. When they start moving on to hypothesizing as to what sorts of things Lenny might’ve done to her when she was a little girl, though, she hits the brake and tumbles them all together. “Sorry, boys,” she sang out. “Hit a little bump in the road.”

She makes sure each and every one of them gets arrested on that job. She doesn’t care if she gets blackballed in Keystone; if they won’t work with her brother, she won’t work with them. Simple as that.

Lenny preens a little when she tells him that, editing out the details a bit. But it does make her think a little bit. Sure, Lenny’s a bit more violent, a little more ruthless, a little more of an adrenaline junkie at all costs than he used to be, but that’s the way most convicts go. He and Mick tear at each other, but that might just be a dragonholder-to-dragonholder thing. 

But there’s the meat.

Now, she wants to be clear, Lenny wasn’t ever a vegetarian. He liked burgers as much as the next guy. When she went to college, he’d invariably take her out to a fancy steakhouse to celebrate. And Mick, well, Mick’s basically a barbequing _god_. Every time they meet up during the summer, they have a few days where they gorge themselves until they need to be rolled up to bed. (They invite the whole building to these events, which usually earns them enough goodwill that no one will be too eager to talk should the cops come by.)

But one day they’re lounging around their latest safe house – Lenny has a couple of bruises trailing down the side of his face and a very prominent bite mark on the side of his neck that she’ll bet matches Mick’s teeth which he keeps touching, smirking every time he does – and Mick walks in with a _bloody hunk of raw meat_ dripping down his arm, which is just covered in blood and gore. 

“There you go,” he says, tossing the meat at Len, who just perks up like Mick gave him flowers or the key to a safe or something. “Goddamn whiny infant.”

“You’re so gracious,” Len teases, and then he _takes a bite_ of it. Doesn’t take it to the kitchen to cook it, just goes right for it, raw juices spilling down the corners of his mouth.

He notices her staring. “You want some?” he asks, clearly reluctant to share his prize. “Or if you’re hungry, I can get Mick to order us some pizza…”

“Yeah, pizza’s good,” she says faintly. He nods, appeased, and goes back to gnawing on his…whatever type of meat that is…while continuing to make comments on the hockey game, like he’s done nothing weird at all.

Mick tries to sit on the sofa but Lisa gives him a dark look. “Wash your hands first,” she says, trying to deal with this issue through a liberal application of denial.

Mick gives her his usual “I am a wild man and you can’t tame me, but I’m going to go do it anyway so you won’t be mad at me” look and goes to clean up. He ends up bringing popcorn back, plus a napkin for Len to wipe the blood off his lips.

They don’t talk about it.

But she thinks about it, sometimes.

\---------------

They were prepping to head out to the first job with their brand new guns – Lenny wanted to hit the Santini casino, he _hated_ being hooded, and Lisa had no objection – when the door flew open and a blurred figure in yellow stood before them. Lisa tensed; this wasn’t the Flash, even she knew that he wore red like it was his religion.

“It seems you’ve become quite the nemesis to the Flash, Mr. Snart.” The man’s voice was low and distorted, the blurring of his voice the same as his face. “I’m afraid that can no longer be permitted to continue –”

Len barks in laughter. “You think you can stop me?” he says scornfully, not even the slightest hint of concern on his face. Lisa glanced at him, worried; this seemed like more of a threat than he was treating it. Len hadn’t won an impromptu one-on-one with a speedster yet, after all. “ _You_? I have nothing to fear from _you_.”

“I think you’ll find, Mr. Snart, that–”

“You lost her, didn’t you?” Len asks, turning to face the man in yellow fully. “You _lost_ her, you pathetic little worm; I can _smell_ it on you. You _left her behind_.”

The man in yellow takes a step back, staggered as if Len had stabbed him instead of just talking to him. “How–”

“Oh, I know you,” Len says, his smile filled with teeth that seemed a little sharper than they had before. “We all know you. You think you can get back to her, don’t you?”

“I _will_ ,” the man insists desperately. “I’m going back – she’s in the future, I’ll get back to her, _she will be mine again_ –”

“You’re a waste of space,” Len says dismissively. “I gave mine up too, you know? Willingly. I may be the only person alive who knows exactly what you feel right now.”

“You got a second…?” The man is suddenly standing in front of Len. “ _How_? Tell me!”

“You don’t want me to do that,” Len tells him. “You’ve got a plan to go back to your one and only, remember?”

“ _Tell me_.”

Len’s smirk is cold and nasty. “Mick,” he calls steadily, not raising his voice. “Come here.”

Mick, who’d been napping in the other room, grumbles audibly but strolls in, yawning. The man in yellow takes one look at him and moans in heartfelt pain.

“I told you you wouldn’t want me to tell you,” Len says. “No one will give up their dragon for _you_ ; you’re nothing but a sodden matchstick that’s lost its chance to ignite. Dead man walking, and you haven’t even been born yet. Better hope that plan of yours works.” He takes a step forward, startling the man in yellow into a small retreat. “And in the meantime, you’d better _stay out of my way_ ,” Len says, only the hint of a snarl in his cool, controlled voice. “Don’t interfere with my games, don’t try to stop me, and don’t even think of threatening me or _anything_ of mine ever again. Central City is _mine_.”

“I was here first,” the man in yellow spits back, but he’s retreating already. “I’ve been dominating this place for fifteen years, you little–” 

“It’s been mine for three decades,” Len says scornfully.

“You leave it unattended for months–”

“Doesn’t matter,” Mick interrupts, his low voice cutting through the argument like the clang of a funeral bell, eyes fixed on the man in yellow. “Even if he did, you can’t claim anything the way you are now. You can’t make a hoard.”

The blurred man staggered again, literally clutching at his chest in apparent agony. 

“Get out,” Len says. “And we won’t _eat you_ for your trespass upon us.”

The man is gone in a burst of lightening.

Lisa waits until the tension dials back down to something a little more normal. “What was that about?” she asked Lenny, who looks totally human, not a hint of whatever monster was looking out from behind his eyes earlier. She plays it casual, but she’s freaked out, she’ll admit it. She’s never seen him go so wild before. 

She thinks it’s been happening more often, too. 

“Nothing to worry about, sis,” he replies, having gone back to fiddle with his gun a little more. “Just a little territorial dispute with a man without a soul.”

Mick snorts. “He’s never getting her back,” he observes. “Not even if his little plan succeeds. He’s got to know that, right?”

“Nope,” Len says, popping the sound out like a bubble of gum. “If he ever let himself know that, he’d kill himself tomorrow.” He grins at her, happy and hyped up for the mission, her familiar big brother. “That’s why he can’t bear to look at me and Mick. We’ve got what he wants.”

Lisa nods; she doesn’t really understand the weird ways dragonholders sometimes talk with each other, as if they speak a language that isn’t entirely English, but she’ll accept that they’ve won something today. 

Though there is one thing…

“You were kidding about eating him, right?” she asks.

“Sure,” Len says distractedly. “It’s not like we’re _cannibals_ , Lise. We’d feed him to Sara and Liesel. _Obviously_.”

Lisa glances at Mick’s sharp-toothed grin and her brother’s cheerful demeanor, thinks about the way they go further and further from human ever year. “Sure,” she agrees. “Obviously.”

\--------------

Her brother and his stupid boyfriend decide to go _time travelling_. She blames all the science-themed shows that were on TV when she was a kid that Lenny watched with her, because she kind of wants to go, too. 

(Lenny draws her a picture of the Waverider – it’s tacked onto the fridge of her current apartment with the words “MICK AND LENNY’S MAGIC SCHOOL BUS” written over the top in large letters. There is also a series of photographs of them and their fellow travelers, collected from various sources, just in case _Back to the Future_ turns out to be a documentary.)

Honestly, it’s probably all for the best. Lenny’s been a bit twitchy ever since the incident with Dad; he followed her out of town the second he got out of prison, pretending to be just in the area but clearly checking up on her. Sarah practically _tackles_ her when she sees her, which, Lisa’s gotta say, you don’t know the meaning of the term “smothered with affection” until there’s a several-ton dragon nuzzling anxiously at you in a reflection of your over-protective big brother’s neuroses. Mick shows up less than a day later, and she gets to have Liesel do the same routine. It’s a good thing that Liesel is cool where Sarah is warm, because she’s sitting on a dragon throne for the rest of the weekend. (Any other chair she tries to park in is mysteriously lit on fire, covered in ice, or is just plain old ripped apart via not-at-all-sneaky application of dragon tail to wood.) She barely manages to convince them to _leave_ at the end of the weekend. 

As it is, she’s brought several rounds of store-bought muffins to her neighbors with apologies for all the noise. She explains that she’s been watching a lot of animal documentaries for a class at school. They totally don’t believe her. 

In his defense, Lenny’s always been protective of her, and finding out that Dad put a bomb in her head just drives him crazy. Plus, being forced to kill Dad had seriously unsettled him. 

Lisa wasn’t sure how she felt about that. On one hand, her dad was a useless piece of crap that should’ve been put in the ground long ago for what he did to Lenny when they were kids, which was always so much worse than anything he’d done to her. On the other, he _was_ her dad. She supposed she should feel bad about his untimely demise. 

She mostly felt bad about the fact that he’d died on his feet, holding a knife to her brother’s throat and threatening to cut him into pieces if he didn’t get rid of the Flash once the Flash revealed that his leverage over Lenny was gone. He’d wanted an exit and he might have been able to bargain his way into one, too, when he gone that extra step too far and claimed he’d put a bomb in Lenny’s head, that he’d use it as leverage over her next. 

The Flash had hesitated. 

Lenny hadn’t; he’d turned his cold gun on himself without a blink, blasting himself, his father, and the entire room behind him with cold. 

Lisa’d seen the video, though she wished she hadn’t. Len’d fallen to his knees, gasping, as the black burns of frostbite began to scorch their way off his skin like dust being shaken out of a doll – she hadn’t known about that new trick of Sarah’s at that point – as the Flash gaped like a fish. 

“How did you…?” he’d asked. “Are you a meta?”

Len shook his head.

The Flash had glanced over at Lewis’ body. “Why’d you do it? Lisa was safe, and you know he was bluffing.”

“He broke my sister’s heart; seems only right that I break his,” Len had replied, waving the Flash away when he tried to help. “Don’t, you’ll just burn yourself.” He shuddered a little, standing up and straightening out, before turning to Dad’s body. Sarah pulled herself out of his back, just her head and wings visible like a guardian angel over his shoulder, and she spat flames down upon the corpse until there was nothing left but ash. 

“You’re a _dragonholder_ ,” the Flash had whispered, appropriately awed. 

Len had smirked at him. “Now you know why I’m a thief,” he’d drawled, pretending to ignore the still steaming ashes behind him and the horrible smell. “My girl here, she’s got expensive tastes.”

The Flash had laughed uproariously. “I can’t believe you’re a _dragonholder_ ,” he enthused. “That’s _so cool_. Or, uh, hot, I guess? I’m surprised you have a fire-drake; I would’ve pegged Heatwave for that.”

“It’s a long story,” Len replied. 

“If you don’t mind me asking, is Heatwave…I mean, does he have…?”

“Yes, Mick’s got an ice-wurm.” Lenny put upon all long-suffering and sighing, but he loved talking about their dragons. “Convenient side effect, he can’t get burned anymore.”

The Flash had _stars_ in his eyes. 

She could tell, because Cisco was having a little geekgasm right next to her. “Two dragonholders!” he hissed at her, then realized she obviously already knew about it and turned to Caitlin. “Two! In the same place! Working together! That never happens! This is the most awesome thing _ever_.”

Yeah, it was really for the best that they head out of town. Far out of town. Out of the timeline.

Though that still might not be far enough to save them from the scientific curiosity of Cisco Ramon.

Lisa has no idea how long they’re gone for, for them, but it’s about nine months before she gets a knock on her door and the present of a set of dorky-looking glasses that immediately become her _new favorite thing_ when she realizes how they pull data out of every local computer system and consolidate it for her convenience. She concedes to function over fashion; she will in fact go full hipster if it means getting this sort of intel, she doesn’t care if Lenny says she looks like she’s trying too hard.

With her attitude, she _never_ looks like she’s trying too hard. 

“So, how was your trip?” she asks.

They never really answer her question, but they do tell her all about the “hoard” they’re building back in Central. 

Lisa really wishes they’d stop calling it a “hoard” or a “lair”, but hey! Her big brother’s finally settling down! She takes what victories she can get and orders them all some champagne. 

“Just so you know,” she tells them as she pours them each a drink. “Sharing a hoard? You’re _totally_ dragon-married.”

Lenny rolls his eyes. Mick grins, throws a possessive arm over Len’s shoulders and says, “Yeah, probably.”

She knew it was a thing.

She will also, one day, _consider_ forgiving Len for the prank with the dolls.

\-----------------

Lisa has contacts at all the Central City newspapers, radio stations, and television channels, plus a close ear to the ground when it comes to the criminal grapevine. She has Cisco hook her up with Felicity (alas, only telephonically – she’s seen pictures; girls like that owe it to the world to be a little experimental, and Lisa’d be happy to volunteer) and gets her metaphorical claws in the internet and secret government-military databases, too. 

Whoever said that information wants to be free has never met a determined Lisa Snart.

Sometimes her brother is so _stupid_ she can’t even begin to comprehend it. Pulling a fully grown dragon out of a full adult, a _well-known_ full adult with the sort of background that any five year old could take two minutes to conclusively determine that he wasn’t previously a dragonholder? Thank god he’d already been declared dead, that’s all Lisa was saying. 

If anyone ever found out about it, it’d make being eaten alive from the inside look like a pleasure cruise. Dragons were the world’s obsession and had been for literally _centuries_. The only thing that kept the ravening masses at bay was the fact that no one could predict if someone would get a dragon or not (not that that stopped there from being a hundred and one “your baby’s dragon” kits out there for expectant parents), because no one knew what factors led to someone being selected as a dragon. Happy childhood, sad childhood, rich, poor – there was no correlation. 

Maybe the dragonholders knew, but none of them had ever admitted to it.

Dragons were the one thing the superrich could never buy, and that drove them all _nuts_.

And now, utterly oblivious to what he’d just done, there was her brother, who could apparently identify and extract dragons from fully grown adults. Adults! Everyone knew only children could be identified as dragonholders. Maybe, _maybe_ , there was still some hope for you as a teenager, but really by the time you hit sixteen you were supposed to be out of luck. 

If Lenny had been running a con, it would have been a great one. The fact that it was real? Not so good. Even outside of the sort of private armies that the superrich and powerful could get their hands on, there were government interests, military interests, scientific interests, each less scrupulous than the last. 

Lisa wasn’t going to let anyone mess with her brother.

She convinced every other Eaten in town to go check out Len and Mick’s new lair – apparently it was the apple in every dragonholder’s eye, universally agreed upon to be a very fine lair indeed even if no human with the slightest bit of taste thought so – to camouflage which one of them it might have been. She doctored photos that showed significantly more interaction between Ray Palmer and Hartley Rathaway than had ever existed in real life (not too much of a stretch – Central City and Starling City’s rich classes weren’t exactly huge), hoping to deflect attention onto him. She spread rumors in the criminal underground about Ray’s winged girlfriend, who was, alternatively, an incarnation of an ancient Egyptian goddess, an alien from the planet Thanagar, or the 207th reincarnation of a meteorite-caused mutant. 

Like her brother before her, she took violent possession of what she valued most, hoarding their safety like a precious jewel even as they descended ever further into tooth and claw.

Lisa Snart stood sentry over her family.

**Author's Note:**

> I take requests here and on tumblr at robininthelabyrinth.
> 
> I also answer questions - this fic is a little unclear, but that's because your POV character is going a tiny little bit insane.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Metal Mouth, Metal Legs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6613270) by [JQ (musicmillennia)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/musicmillennia/pseuds/JQ)




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